A word about the overall methodology to be employed in presenting Ultimate Event Theory.
A completely axiomatic theory, by which I mean a subject worked up entirely from first principles without any appeal to experience, does not exist though Euclidian geometry comes very close to it, hence its enormous success as a role model. But even Euclid and the Greek geometers, though they made it clear that they were dealing with ‘ideal’ forms, not actual spheres and triangles made of wood or clay, were able to make an implicit appeal to their readers’ experience of balls of wool, stone pyramids and so on. And even the most abstract reaches of modern mathematics appeal implicitly to everyone’s experience (not ‘intuition’) of substance, shape and form, likewise our ingrained familiarity with the natural numbers.
Scientists, though supposed to start with experience and experiment, have been so enamoured of the axiomatic method that they have repeatedly made a valiant attempt to throw their own discoveries into a deductive mould, as Newton, Einstein and countless others did. School textbook presentations of elementary chemistry and physics are likewise broadly axiomatic in their presentation, relying as they do on unproven (and often unprovable) assumptions about the three states of matter, the conservation of mass-energy and so forth. But these very assumptions which have hardened into (useful) dogma were rarely if ever discovered by rigorous deductive reasoning : the whole science of heat machines was developed by practical men who were never very sure of where they were going. Or again, great discoveries those came from what appeared at first to be wild and fantastic speculations : Newton’s hypothesis about universal attraction was rejected outright by most continental scientists of his time and viewed as an example of the very sort of appeal to ‘occult forces’ that they at all costs wished to avoid. Einstein eventually threw his Special Theory of Relativity into a deductive mould, deriving his surprising results from his two key assumpti0ons, the invariance of the ‘laws of physics’ within all inertial frames, and the absolute nature of the speed of light in a vacuum. But, by his own admission, he first got his great idea by pondering at the age of sixteen what would happen if something exceeded the speed of light — a typical schoolboy ‘thought experiment’.
I am not even convinced that a deductive, axiomatic presentation really fits what actually happens in the real world; such an approach made sense in the days when Western scientists believed that an all-powerful God had made the entire universe with the aid of a handful of mathematical formulae. Although there must seemingly be some basic principles behind and within all that we see and hear, there is no reason why these principles should be mathematical in nature : certainly, this is not the way biological systems work since species, while subject to certain overall physical constraints, ‘make things up’ as they go along, trial and error (especially the latter) helping the process. The world-view of everything ‘obeying’ a set of pre-existing formulae and ‘laws’ is perhaps beginning to outlive its usefulness.
But having said that, the appeal of a broadly axiomatic presentation is irresistible, which is why I have made the attempt to throw Ultimate Event Theory into such a mould, selecting five or six ‘Axioms’ and seeing what can be derived from them.
There are also certain more general ‘principles’ which underlie a lot of the argumentation. The first is what has been called Occam’s Razor, or the Principle of Parsimony, and which amounts to always choosing what appears to be the simplest assumption or conclusion other things being equal. (According to Bertrand Russell, Occam, a medieval logician, never wrote that “Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity” as he is usually quoted as stating — though he did write “It is pointless to do with more what can be done with less” which comes to much the same thing.) The Principle of Parsimony is uncontroversial and very little needs to be said about it except that it is a Ppinciple that is, as it were, imposed on us by necessity rather than being ‘self-evident’. We do not really have any right to assume that Nature always chooses the simplest course : indeed it often looks as if Nature enjoys complication just for the sake of it. Aristotle’s Physics was a good deal simpler than Newton’s and the latter’s simpler than Einstein’s : but the weight of evidence has been to the advantage of the more complex theory. (Still, one might wonder whether theoretical physics has become too enamoured of complication and unecessary entities, preferring to expand further and further from sense experience into the ‘infinite’ rather than re-evaluate what lies at the bottom of the present towering mathematical house of cards (1).)
The second principle may be called the Principle of Parmenides, since he first stated it in its most extreme form, “If there were no limits, there would be nothing”. This may sound unexceptional but what I deduce from this is the necessity to dispel the notion of actual (or possible) infinity from science altogether, and likewise in mathematics. The ‘infinite’ is by definition ‘limitless’ and so falls under the ban of this very sensible principle. Infinity also has no basis in our sense experience since no one, with the possible exception of certain mystics, has ever claimed to have ‘known’ the infinite. Mystical experience, though in its way perfectly valid, requires careful assessment before it can be introduced into science and, in the majority of cases, it will be seen that what mystics (think they) experience is not at all what mathematicians call the ‘infinite’ but rather a reality which is ‘non-finite’ in the sense that any form of measurement is totally inappropriate and irrelevant. In present-day science, ‘infinity’ merely functions as a sort of permanent deus ex machina to get one out of a tight spot, and even then only temporarily. There is not a scrap of evidence to suggest that any known process or observable entity actually is either ‘infinitely big’ or ‘infinitely small’ : all energy exchanges are subject to quantum restrictions (i.e. come in finite packages) and all sorts of entities which were once regarded as ‘infinitely tiny’ can now actually be ‘seen’, if only through an electron microscope. Even the universe we live in, which for Newton and everyone else alive at his time, was ‘infinite’, is currently believed to have a maximum extent and a specific age to which a number has even been given. All that is left as a final bastion of the infinite is space and time and even here one or two contemporary physicists are suggesting that the fabric of Space-Time may be ‘grainy’.
What can an axiomatic theory be expected to do? One thing it cannot be expected to do is to give specific quantitative results : Newton deduced that the law of gravitation had to be an inverse square law but it was some time before a value could be attributed to the gravitational constant, G. Eddingon quite properly said that we could conclude simply by reasoning that in any physical universe there would have to be an upper bound for the speed of transmitting information, but that we could not deduce the actual value of this upper bound was c.
Also, it is legitimate even in an axiomatic theory to appeal to experience from time to time, provided one does not abuse this facility. For example, a line of argument which ‘deduced’ that the universe was completely empty of matter (as de Sitter’s solution of Einstein’s field equations did) would have to be modified since we personally know better; similarly, Einstein’s own original solutions to his equations of General Relativity had to be tampered with once it became known that the universe was expanding. One would, however, want a broadly axiomatic theory to nonetheless lead, by reasoning alone, to some results which, experimentally, we know to be correct, and also, if possible, to make other predictions that no other theory had made.
A new theory which embodies a very different ‘take’ on the world may still prove worthwhile even if it has to be discarded : it may point the way to other theories by pointing in a certain direction. Predictive power is not the only goal and raison d’etre of a scientific theory : the old Ptolemaic astronomy was, at the time, perfectly satisfactory as a predictive system and, according to Koestler, Copernicus’s original heliocentric system was no simpler. As a piece of kinematics, the Ptolemaic Earth-centred system was adequate and, with the addition of a few more epicycles and the aid of computers, could probably ‘give the right answer’ even today. However, Copernicus’s revolution paved the way for Galileo’s and Newton’s dynamical world-view in which the movements of planets were viewed in terms of applied forces and so proved far more fruitful.
It is worth saying that a different world-view from the currentestablished one may be more satisfactory with regard to certain areas, while being utterly inadequate for other purposes. Although I believe there is only one reality, no one theory can hope to cope successfully with everything — though this is precisely what many contemporary reductionist scientists imagine. If one is completely honest, one would, I think, have to admit that the now completely discarded magical animistic world-view has a cogency and persuasiveness when applied to aberrant human behaviour that modern scientific theories lack : this is why we still talk of charm, charisma, inspiration, luck, jinxes, fascination, destiny all concepts that belong firmly to another era. Likewise, jumping ahead to the more recent past, ‘force’ has ceased to be a vitally important concept in the modern scientific world-view, having been replaced by the intangible concept of ‘energy’, but we still feel completely at ease talking about the ‘pull of the Moon’ or universal attraction and probably will continue to do so for a long time yet. Even physicists do not talk about the deformation of the local Space-Time field caused by the presence of a massive body.
Finally, the world-views of other cultures and societies are not just historical curiosities : in some cases these societies may have scored where modern science flounders. Ultimate Event Theory has its roots in the world-views of societies long dead and gone : in particular the world-views of Buddhists in Northern India during the first few centuries of our era, and the world-views of Native Amerindian tribes as reflected in their languages and mythologies. For some reason, I instinctively relate to these world-views, find them perfectly plausible, indeed true, even if they are wrong, which is why, after years of hesitation, I have decided to try to develop these assumptions in a more or elss rational deductive manner.

Notes : (1) Larry Constantine, in a notable recent letter in the New Scientist (13 Aug 2011 p. 30), wrote : Accounting form our universe by postulating infinite parallel universes or explaining the Big Bang as the collision of “branes” are not accounts at all, but merely ignorance swept under a cosmic rug — a rug which itself demands explanation but is in turn buried under still more rugs.”